TextFlow Desktop: An Alternative to Office Docs Collaboration

Today, Nordic River announces the launch of TextFlow Desktop, which aims to streamline MS Word and Open Office document collaboration, editing, workflow and decision making. We spoke with Tomer Shalit, CEO of Nordic River,about the newest release and what's to come.

Streamlining workflow is about more than just comparing documents for changes. While the world of collaborative writing has allowed many people to submit changes and make updates to documents, it has done little to aide decisions about what content to keep and what edits to ignore.

Addressing Typical Scenarios

Picture it. A company not unlike your own. A simple enough task with the potential of creating bigger issues.

Three colleagues use Microsoft Word to add changes to one document. Employing track changes, they each save a copy of the edited document.

By the end of day, the project manager gets as many as four Word documents with multiple edits. Going through each to evaluate and sync changes is sure to take longer than needed.

With TextFlow Desktop, document owners can take charge and drag&drop all four documents into the desktop dashboard. Each document then shows the original text, while color-coded edits of colleagues can be scanned, approved, re-arranged or ignored.

TextFlow desktop allows users to make and visualize changes in content without losing format work.

Once updates have been made, a final document can be exported back to Word in its original layout with updated content based on team members’ input. TextFlow Desktop’s new features give users of Microsoft Word, as well as Open Office, a way to collaborate and dynamically review documents with complete control over the work process.

Decisions, Decisions

TextFlow aims to influence the decision making process as far as content is concerned. Certainly collaborative writing and workflows help to gather ideas and concepts, but it’s often hard to compare edits and make final content decisions.

With TextFlow, Microsoft Word users are provided a simple, yet dynamic way to gather and review text input from colleagues, partners and clients in order to make effective decisions on which contributions will go into the next version.

At present, TextFlow Desktop is designed specifically for Open Office and Microsoft Word. However, keep an eye out for updates that will be able to import from Google Docs and PDFs.

TextFlow Desktop is sold for a one-time fee of US$ 99.00, with a 14-day free trial available.